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The first time it happened, it was an accident. But every dream is.
It would have been my last REM cycle of the night, had I been able to sleep. Instead, for the previous six hours, I had counted sheep, had dressed for imaginary occasions in my mind, had tried the Army sleep techniques, alternately imagined myself in a black velvet hammock and in a canoe on a calm, still lake. I’d meditated. I’d thought of my mother, a lifelong insomniac who has rarely slept more than four hours a night in her life. I’d tried everything and given up. All I could do was wait for morning.
The dream grabbed my ankles first, pulled at me like someone dislodging a drain. Out it tossed me through my sliding glass window, over the garden, over my quiet street, over the dark sleeping skyline, a ragdoll flung into the Santa Anas. I soared high enough to see Los Angeles’s motherboard of electric light. I could see the city in perfect detail below. I was asleep — no, I was awake! I felt the cold whipping through my hair as I tumbled like a deflating balloon through the sky. I felt the miles beneath me. I felt the warm pillow beneath my cheek. I dove, flew, dipped, conscious of it all.
So this is a lucid dream, I thought.
More than half of adults will have this experience or one like it at some point in their lives. They’ll go to sleep, and as their REM cycles accumulate, as night shades into morning, as their sports car turns into a banana, they will suddenly realize, as I did: This is not real. This is a dream.
The flash of lucidity can come as quite a shock, enough to startle a novice into waking. But if you can hang on and stay conscious, you’ll be in for the ride of your life.
After the first one, my curiosity was piqued. I started lurking in online forums, reading accounts of similar experiences from communities of “oneironauts,” or dream explorers. From them I learned that lucid dreams need not be a fluke experience: I could cultivate and, with some practice, control them.
The first thing I needed to do was establish a baseline awareness of the difference between waking and dreaming using a technique called “critical state testing.” This is how it works: Several times a day, ask yourself if what you are experiencing is a dream. To make sure you’re awake, count your fingers. Plug your nose. Look at your watch, then look again to see if the numbers have moved.
If you do this often enough, the habit will spill over into your dreams. And when it does, you’ll find that your fingers are jelly. That you can breathe with your nose plugged. That your watch is unreadable. “dream standard time,” the psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge called it in his 1990 manual, “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming”:asleep and awake at once.
Read the rest of this article at: Noema
My wife always said she would die of Alzheimer’s. It turns out she was right about that. For years, I insisted she would not. In the end, Vanessa clinched our little argument by dying last September, but we had known her fate since 2019, the year she was diagnosed, at the age of 49. For at least three years before that, though, the realisation dawned by hideous degrees which way the debate was going.
When we met, in the mid-00s, the proposition that Vanessa did not have Alzheimer’s, nor was about to develop it, was an easy motion to defend. She was dazzling and creative, with a successful career as a marketing executive. In that context, her preoccupation with this old person’s disease came across as a little absurd.
We met on the dancefloor of a nightclub in 2004. I was 32, she was about to turn 35. Far too old for a place like that, but we were reliving former glories in honour of mutual friends – a last glance back at our careless youth. When the management turned us out after a long night of carousing into the next stage of our lives, Vanessa scribbled her number for me on a piece of paper. How she would have loved to be able to do that only 15 years later.
A few weeks into our relationship, she told me that her mum, in her 50s, was dying of Alzheimer’s and, a little later again, that she was sure to do the same. I put her fears down to general fatalism, and spent much of the following decade insisting she had nothing to worry about. Until I could no longer find plausible grounds to argue that everything was fine.
A common question is: when did the disease start? There is no neat answer. It’s possible Vanessa could feel it coming on long before any of her symptoms showed. To the outside world, though, Alzheimer’s reveals itself by subtle degrees, each one plausibly dismissed in the early stages as “nothing”. And even when they start to become obviously “something”, there is usually a range of alternative explanations. The twisted genius of this disease begins with the way it smuggles itself in under the cover of other conditions. Absent-mindedness, ageing, menopause, through depression, anxiety and epilepsy – all would be presented as perfectly plausible explanations, first by me, then by some serious experts in their field. In retrospect, though, it began with a zit on her chin.
We used to go out for dinner at the end of family holidays in Devon. There is a beach cafe overlooking the sea, round the headland from where we were married in 2006. As we sat down for the 2013 edition, I pointed out the zit with much amusement. Vanessa responded in a similar vein. For a minute or so, the repartee was spiky and hilarious. Then we looked at the menu.
At the end of the meal, as we were leaving, I cracked another joke about the monstrous carbuncle.
Vanessa looked at me in horror. “What? I’ve got a zit on my chin?”
I remember the chill. We were well used to her mislaying car keys and sunglasses and whatnot. But this seemed different. This was an entire conversation we had just had.
It didn’t really matter. The incident was isolated, and life went on as normal. Maybe the first doubts started to niggle in the back of my mind, but I maintained the line. There was nothing unusual about any of this. What she must not do is ruin her life worrying about it.
There is no point worrying about dementia. One in 14 of us will develop it if we live beyond 65, one in six if we go beyond 80. There are various lifestyle choices we can make to lessen our risk (public health officials have identified 12), of which it pays to be aware, but worrying is not one of them. What will be will be.
It is true, though, that this is a hateful disease once it starts to take hold. Its ultimate genius is the way it comes for the very soul of you. You never hear about a brave fight against dementia, as you do so many other conditions, because you can’t fight it. To fight is to make a choice, which requires cognition. By degrees, dementia disables that faculty, rendering its victim helpless.
There is a mini-industry of advice on how to stave off dementia (start with exercise, smoking, diet) and then, as the saying goes, to “live well with dementia” once diagnosed. This latter movement is controversial, its proponents declaring themselves as diagnosed with dementia, then writing books, blogs and speeches about it, often for more than 10 years.
Read the rest of this article at: The Guardian
In my twenties, I had a friend who used to show up at my doorstep uninvited with a six-pack of Red Stripe. She had a terrible job and a worse boyfriend, and whenever either was bumming her out, she’d plop down on the orange couch that my roommate had gotten from her dead great-aunt and tell us everything. In 2017, she moved to Montana, and I suppose if I had to pinpoint it, I’d say that’s when the trouble began.
One day it became undeniable that I had a friendship void in my life. I didn’t lose my friends. There was no big dustup or disaster. No romantic rivalries or fights about politics had gotten in the way. They didn’t even go missing, exactly—I knew where they were. After Red Stripe landed in Missoula, the couple whose deck we used to grill sausages on decamped to Vermont. Around the same time, L. A. started acquiring my friends at an alarming rate, and the ones who remained all seemed to have colicky babies or punishing home-renovation projects on their hands. I admitted to myself that I’d had a hand in it, too: After all, I hadn’t changed cities in fourteen years, a job in five, or a romantic partner since Obama’s first term.
Read the rest of this article at: GQ
Readers of books from the New York publisher Knopf will be familiar with the leaping dog that appears on their spines. In 1915, when Alfred Knopf started the firm, his wife Blanche was ‘crazy about borzois’, and she suggested the animal as the publisher’s colophon. Though the logo lingers more than a century on, Blanche’s enthusiasm for the breed was brief. ‘I bought a couple of them later,’ she told the New Yorker writer Geoffrey T. Hellman in 1948, ‘and grew to despise them. They were cowardly, stupid, disloyal, and full of self-pity, and they kept running away. One died, and I gave the other to a kennel.’ Hellman relates the story of a weekend in the country when Joseph Hergesheimer, a Knopf bestseller and one of the most critically lauded American novelists of the second and third decades of the twentieth century, came down to breakfast on Sunday morning complaining that the ‘moans and whimpers of the surviving borzoi’ had kept him up all night. ‘I bet Charles Scribner has no such goddam dog,’ he said. ‘The Knopfs exchanged glances,’ Hellman writes, ‘and Mrs Knopf went in for Yorkshire terriers.’
It’s an amusing anecdote and telling in a few ways. The Borzoi logo remains, and is one of the most recognizable symbols in corporate publishing. But its original meaning was erased, at least in the mind of the publisher and his wife, who as vice president, director and part owner of Knopf, took a strong hand in bringing in new authors. An advertisement from the 1920s reads: ‘Take home a Borzoi Book and spend a pleasant evening . . . It is obvious by their nature that books can never be uniform in quality of contents. But they must conform to certain well-defined standards of excellence to achieve the imprint of BORZOI . . . Look for the Borzoi label and then buy the book!’ Marketing of this kind has long been out of style. The image of the borzoi was immediately vestigial, and so, forty years after Alfred’s death, is the name Knopf itself.
Blanche’s line about her pets – ‘They were cowardly, stupid, disloyal, and full of self-pity, and they kept running away’ – you can imagine publishers saying it of authors or authors saying it of publishers. I have heard versions from both sides, though mostly from authors. The metaphor of the story, surely not lost on Hellman, is the irritation caused to the talent by the living representatives of management. The talent jokes about leaving for other management. It’s a chummy arrangement, an author weekending with his publishers in the country, but they’re still all actors in a marketplace.
Read the rest of this article at: Granta
The ocean is a lonely, perilous place. It is especially so when you are aboard a leak-prone wooden vessel laden with a rich cargo of sugar, silks, and opium, like the traders sailing the Quedagh Merchant around India’s southern tip in 1698. They surely panicked when they spied a massive warship with thirty-four mounted guns bearing down on them—or would have, had it not been flying French colors. The Quedagh Merchant had a document, written in an elegant hand, guaranteeing safe passage from France. French ships posed no threat; they might even offer protection, information, or supplies.
The Quedagh Merchant sent over a boat with a French gunner carrying the pass. As he stepped aboard the warship, though, it hoisted a new flag: the English one. The gunner soon realized it was a trap. This wasn’t a French ship; it was Captain William Kidd’s Adventure Galley. And this wasn’t a parley; it was a robbery.
For Captain Kidd, it was a life-changing haul, one that he predicted would “make a great Noise in England.” He was right. Kidd became the “Subject of all Conversation” there, a contemporary wrote, his life “chanted about in Ballads.” One is still sung today: “My name is Captain Kidd, / And God’s laws I did forbid, / And most wickedly I did, / As I sailed.”
It’s as if Kidd and his fellow-marauders never stopped sailing. These days, pirates are everywhere. The five “Pirates of the Caribbean” films have collectively grossed billions. And then there are the shows, games, memes, bars, festivals, and rum bottles. Three major sports teams are named for them—the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Las Vegas Raiders, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers: the first two from cities with no connection to piracy whatsoever.
The pirates we typically have in mind are specific ones: the English-speaking sea robbers who sailed from the mid-seventeenth century to the first few decades of the eighteenth. And what makes these maritime lawbreakers of long ago so fascinating that, three centuries later, we’re still dressing up like them? The easy answer is that they were rebels. We delight in their lusty, wild lives because we, too, want to live freely. Pirates are especially fascinating because they sailed at the dawn of our era, just as the British Empire was rising and the portcullis of modernity was descending. Viewed in a certain light, pirates—the scourge of admirals and merchants—were the last holdouts against a world dominated by states and corporations.
But were pirates implacable foes of the modern order? Power and piracy were not always clearly distinct, at least not in the early days of English capitalism. It’s worth asking whether the world that pirates mutinied against wasn’t also, in part, a world of their own making.
A sign of our sympathy for pirates is that their heyday is known as the Golden Age of Piracy, roughly from 1650 to 1730. The pirates who lived then can be divided into generations. The first, the buccaneers, plundered Spain’s holdings around the Caribbean in the middle of the seventeenth century. The second, Kidd among them, most often launched from North America’s mainland and secured their greatest bounties in the Indian Ocean in the sixteen-nineties. It was the third generation, sailing from 1716 to 1726, that flew black flags and attacked nearly everyone.
It’s only the last generation, which included notorious captains like Blackbeard and Bartholomew (Black Bart) Roberts, that fully matches our canonical image of the pirate. Interestingly, though, there weren’t many of them. Piracy’s leading historian, Marcus Rediker, estimates that just four thousand pirates sailed in the black-flag era. If he’s right, more people have worked on the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films than were actual pirates of the Caribbean.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
